


Toiling Upward

by Fire_Sign



Category: Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-26
Updated: 2017-02-26
Packaged: 2018-09-27 02:17:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,577
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9945839
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fire_Sign/pseuds/Fire_Sign
Summary: The heights by great men reached and kept were not attained by sudden flight, but they, while their companions slept, were toiling upward in the night.--Henry Wadsworth LongfellowThey agree to go back, to pretend that it never happened, that it was never more than flirting and innuendo and a bit of fun. (Time doesn’t work like that.) They intend to remain investigative partners; they don’t talk of much, but it comes up one night on the ship—the classes mingle and their paths cross and somehow they had need to come up with some definition and that’s what comes out, in a funny oblique little way that defines them more than anything they can say. (Life doesn’t work like that.) Maybe it is a bad idea, but at least it is something to stifle the loss, even if that loss is better than what they had found in Europe. (People don’t work like that.)Or, what happens when I try to fix something someone else broke.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [olderbynow](https://archiveofourown.org/users/olderbynow/gifts).



> Okay, sooooo... olderbynow's ficathon fic, [Tales of a Wayside Romance 1930](http://archiveofourown.org/works/8938471/chapters/20461132) was really lovely and gorgeous and the first time I read it I ended up shouting at her to PLEASE make somebody fix it, and that somebody ended up being me. Only I _hated_ what I wrote. Hated. Loathed, even. It was known as The Purple Fic, and read like somebody had read the original and tried to explain it, only it went through Google Translate fifty times before getting back to English and THAT was what I had based mine off of. It was hideous, and I shared it with her and then shelved it and basically forgot it existed. Until last week, when olderbynow mentioned the fix-it fic. And since the only things I hate more than this fic are Donald Trump and somebody having something to hold over me, y'all are getting The Purple Fic in al its glory. I'm not sure who wins this battle, really, but whatevs. Title quote comes from the same bloke who wrote the poem Tales of a Wayside Inn that olderbynow used as inspiration for hers, so...

They agree to go back, to pretend that it never happened, that it was never more than flirting and innuendo and a bit of fun. (Time doesn’t work like that.) They intend to remain investigative partners; they don’t talk of much, but it comes up one night on the ship—the classes mingle and their paths cross and somehow they had need to come up with some definition and that’s what comes out, in a funny oblique little way that defines them more than anything they can say. (Life doesn’t work like that.) Maybe it is a bad idea, but at least it is something to stifle the loss, even if that loss is better than what they had found in Europe. (People don’t work like that.)

Only, they’ve been home for weeks (months, but weeks seems more manageable) and they haven’t spoken once. They are not completely without news—the Collinses make certain of that—but for the first time in two years, Jack turns at a crime scene without seeing a flurry of feathers, Phryne has more nightcaps alone. And it is, oddly, almost manageable—there was too much said, or not said, or said the wrong way, and anything is better than the mess they had made. 

(Sometimes, though, sometimes a police officer is injured on the line of duty and Phryne twists her own scarf as she reassures Dot that they would have been told if it was Hugh, waiting in fear for the knock on the door or for Hugh to come into Wardlow and tell them it was the inspector. Sometimes there’s a murder at a fundraiser and Jack wonders if it’s her, if she’s dazzling whichever constable had responded, if there’s a new inspector telling her not to meddle. They miss each other, but they do not miss what they had become.)

And then one day there is a body at Rippon Lea—Jack wonders if the house is cursed, because it is the only grand house in Melbourne he has been called to repeatedly—and he almost sends his senior sergeant. Almost, until she telephones near tears and asks him to come; it is a friend of hers, a suicide she’s not convinced is a suicide.

“I need Jack Robinson,” she says, and he notices that she doesn’t say she needs _him_. 

He nods, even though he knows she can’t see, and grabs his hat and coat.

She’s waiting outside the bedroom, unwilling to be with the body—she’d already gotten all the information she needed to know—but unwilling to allow potential interference. She hears him before she can see him, the long, sure strides that drew her to him early on; she does like a man that can walk well.

(She almost didn’t call him, her hand on the telephone and her Aunt Prudence’s words echoing in her ears. “This is why I didn’t want you involved,” she had sniffed, and Phryne can’t even bring herself to explain that it wasn’t like _that_. She hadn’t broken his heart or thrown him away on a lark, she had wanted it to work, and it hadn’t, and she wasn’t even certain why.)

“Miss Fisher.”

It’s a head nod, his face grim and serious and none of that laughing joy she’d come to know, but the franticness, the single-minded pursuit of pleasure is gone as well and that might hurt more than anything. It had driven its wedge and disappeared, payment extracted for her audacity to believe that love—that sort of love—was for her. 

“Hello, Jack!” she says, her voice as light as it has ever been. 

The time apart has changed nothing, and there’s nothing to be said for that so she tells him about the victim instead.

“David Worthington. 33, heir to the Worthington fortune—manufacturing, mostly. His father is dying, and his sister is furious that she’s been written out of the will.”

Her tone clearly tells him what she thinks of _that_ , and there’s a certain wryness in his responding look.

“I would think you in favour of a woman inheriting.”

“Not when the woman’s never lifted a finger to run the businesses. Junia’s ten years younger and used to having it all handed to her without a fight,” she says, and can’t stop herself from adding, “but you’d like her. She’s blonde.”

She nearly strangles him with her mink stole when he tips his head in acknowledgement before moving past her. 

The man in question is slumped over a writing desk, blood staining the note he’s left behind. It’s all pretty standard stuff, which Jack is pettily thankful for—he’s preoccupied by trying not to catch her perfume mingled with the copper of blood, by trying to ignore that prickling sensation on the back of his neck that follows her as she moves about the room, by wondering what the woman’s hair colour had to do with anything before remembering a conversation in a Parisian cafe about types. The conversation that had been the start of the end, or would have been if they weren’t in the midst of imploding before, so used to shellfire they hadn’t even noticed. 

“An old friend?” he asks, not turning to look at her; she’s rifling through the man’s undergarments, so he’s presuming there’s some sort of intimacy.

She wishes she could say yes, quipping that it wasn’t that old, just to throw it in his face. 

“I imagine his fiancée would object,” she says instead.

“Not the sharing sort?”

Which is a perfectly innocent question, but his tone says everything that his words don’t; she hates him for it, and he hates himself. But it’s out now, and he can’t even say he doesn’t mean it. 

She turns on her heel and walks away.

It would almost be worth it, if it kept her away; it doesn’t, of course—she’s waiting for him in the room where all the guests are assembled, and he has to smile and nod and make notes while she runs the interviews because it’s Miss Fisher and some things do not change even in the face of cataclysm. 

(He wonders how much he has changed in the face of Phryne Fisher.)

There is Mrs. Stanley, who greets him as an old friend rather than an intruder, asks how he has been; he is fairly certain that she's innocent, not because she’s incapable of murder but because she would never get caught.

(Also, that any homicide would be justified.)

(He wonders, idly, what would have happened if he'd allowed her in a room with Murdoch Foyle.)

There is Junia Worthington, she of youth and idleness and golden hair, who barely spares Jack a glance before resuming her conversation with a well-dressed man to her left. John Fitzgerald, Phryne informs him, _sotto voce_. A friend of the Worthington family. Clara Summerfield is last, the jealous fiancée, and for someone so recently bereaved she does an admirable job flirting with Jack. All have means, motive, and opportunity, if indeed this is not a suicide.

(“Was it Clara that caught your eye?” Phryne asks as they leave. “I hardly thought she was your type.”)

———

It’s deliberate, coming to sit on his desk as if they really are what they once were, instead of pretending that a shattered tea cup will still hold water. Doing so without knickers—shimmied out of in the lavatory of the station, which has a certain sort of grubbiness she tries hard to ignore—is, perhaps, her first and only foray into intentional cruelty. 

She’s not entirely certain why she does it, just that it feels important to prove her point. 

He’d said—the unrestrained Jack of Europe, before he’d slipped away entirely—that he’d fantasised about the desk, about screwing her so efficiently she wouldn’t have time to scream; she’d imagined it too, before then and after—even when they had ended it, it had been there in her dreams: skirts rucked up, his palms on her hips and his fingers digging into her ass as he thrust, his mouth on her neck and the hard length of him hitting all those places that make her tremble, of shattering against him so hard she could not speak.

(There are, in those treacherous dreams, the moments _after,_ where she looks at him and he smiles softly, kisses her lightly, wipes her thighs with his linen handkerchief with a tenderness that leaves her entirely speechless in other ways. Where she runs her hands across the planes of his face, down his rumpled shirt, across his softening cock to tuck away with care. She wants to wake before that happens, but the one time she does there’s a strange ache in her chest, a feeling of unfulfillment.)

He is not immune to her lounging; he wishes he was. The glimpse of garter, the rise of her skirt—his memory supplies what his imagination used to, and somehow it is worse to know that there’s a scar about halfway up her thigh from an incident tree-climbing, the exact softness of her skin, the way she grips at his clothes when he brings her to climax.

(He thought, naively, that if he just lived enough of a life when he had her, living in the aftermath wouldn’t be so hard.)

He almost asks her to remove herself, but that feels too much like before, so he turns back to the crime scene photographs and pretends to be absorbed in the exact angle of impact. She’s right, of course; she always is. Murder then, and likely to be long and complicated and result in a mountain of paperwork he will bury himself in at the end of the case while he pretends that he’s not thinking of a parlour in St. Kilda and nightcaps. (He knows that he can’t face it, even if they are pretending that everything is fine.)

The exact moment he sees her lack of knickers is noticed by them both, the bobbing of his Adam’s apple, a glance, his hands tensing and releasing around his pen.

“Collins!” he calls, his constable the only other person in the building. “Go get yourself some dinner.”

It’s cocky and confident and just a little bit wrong, but she’s missed his hands and whatever point she was trying to prove seems absent in the face of it, so she locks both doors of his office and comes to rest in the centre of the desk. 

“I could press charges,” he says, and she wants him to press everything else; she dips her hand up the skirt and feels that somehow she is already desperate for him.

(Perhaps she is always desperate for him.)

He pushes her hand away, tests for himself, grins wolfishly—she knows that look, has memorised every face he will make and what it precedes, reclines on her elbows and lets him have his feast.

He is a starving man and she in his banquet, and it’s good—he winds her up and makes her shatter, hard and fast, and she can’t suppress the scream when she comes.

It is, for an assignation, pretty damned good.

(Neither of them is satisfied.)

 

———

Back at Rippon Lea, they ask more questions, two celestial bodies in orbit but never touching; Phryne wonders, thinking of the night before, what would happen if they did. It was a supernova, a star’s final blaze of glory.

(She wants him, the man he was before she ruined him. Before he ruined her.)

(He wants her, the woman he had almost understood. Or perhaps understood too well.)

Like a sore tooth, she cannot let it lie. She pokes and prods and tests him, waits for the pain. Like a gaping wound, he cannot stop the blood. He circles inwards, raises defenses, pretends that he does not see her attempts to goad him—he would wonder why she is so invested, but it hardly matters now and maybe he’s better off not knowing. 

He’s interviewing the fiancée again, unconvinced by her story and looking for more, when Phryne walks into the room and sees the fiancée’s hand on his arm.

She sniffs. Loudly.

“Cold, Miss Fisher?” he asks, and she adjusts the fur collar of her coat.

(He is not thinking what it would feel like to press his cheek against it, suckling at her throat.)

When the fiancée is gone—and Jack is certain she is guilty of something, though possibly not the murder—Phryne glares at him.

“A ginger?” she says dismissively. “Are you trying to collect an entire set?”

He bites his tongue, keeps himself from asking what business it is of hers when she has a museum’s worth of former lovers.

(She sees it in his eyes, and wants to scream that it _matters_ because Jack cannot take a woman to bed on a whim—the blonde gets beneath her skin, makes her wonder how he could so easily fall into her when he’d resisted Phryne for so long—that every old friend of his was taking something that should belong to her. That would have belonged to her, if he’d stayed in Melbourne instead of following her across the globe on _her_ whims. She’s not quite certain who she is mad at anymore.)

“David was having an affair,” she says, remembering why she had sought him out to begin with. “His fiancée knew.”

“With whom?”

It’s John Fitzgerald; childhood friend and confidante. They bring him to the station for questioning—both of them pretending that Jack’s office does not exist, that it had not taken less than 24 hours before they had resumed everything they had tried to leave behind.

(He thinks it was worth it, almost, to see her face as she came one last time; they hadn’t known, before, that it _was_ the last time.) 

(She knows it will happen again, that if she cannot _have_ Jack than she will take whatever shadow of a man she has left him as.)

The interview turns into confession, a case of jealousy; simple after all. They return to his office without thinking, taking up position on either side of his desk and most definitely not thinking of his head between her thighs, of eyes turned up to watch her, the intensity of that gaze prolonging her ecstasy. 

He wonders if they could have lasted, if he hadn’t thrown himself so thoroughly into it, had kept the reserve that had let them dance around matters for months. It’s unlikely, he concludes—the ending was inevitable, it was simply a matter of how they got there that was in question. 

“Will you come around this evening?”

The words are out of her mouth before she has time to regret them. He shakes his head, and whatever his reason it feels like a rejection.

“Too occupied with an attractive blonde?”

“Will you fucking drop it, Phryne?” he snaps. “I didn’t sleep with her.”

He doesn’t mean to admit it, that even when she practically threw a woman in front of him and told him to go to town he could not be the man she clearly wanted him to be. He’s given up trying to understand why the possibility he had been offends her so.

Phryne grabs his whiskey decanter and a tumbler, then sinks into a chair.

“Why didn’t you just say that?”

“Because it didn’t make a difference.”

It would have made all the difference. To know that in the shifting sands he was still Jack—lost in himself, but Jack—and reminding her she was Phryne. 

(It is weak to need this, but all she can think is that they were supposed to face it _together_.)

The whiskey burns on the way down, and she pours another.

———

It’s another month before they meet again, this time at a christening for the Collins infant, a squalling red thing the parents adore; not even for Dot can Phryne find a true affection. The church is full, and when Jack comes in late the only space is near Phryne and Mac in the back pew. Mac refuses to move, leaving him no choice but to either take a seat next to Phryne or leave entirely. 

It is a reality of the cramped quarters that their hands brush; later they are not quite certain which one of them grasped first—around the time the girl is screaming at the indignity of water on her head, they realise their fingers are laced together, and blush as they pull away simultaneously. 

She can smell him, and (for once) she wishes her sense of smell was not so well-developed. She wants to bury her nose in the crook of his neck, make a dry comment that makes it clear she adores Dot but also that she is here under duress, feel his chuckle.

She wants him.

He can sense every shift in her seat, and wishes (as he often has before) that his body was not quite so attuned to hers. He wants to touch her, wants to get through this ceremony—because it’s important to Collins, and somehow that has made it important to Jack—and take her home and map her skin.

He wants her.

(But mostly they miss each other, the friendship that had seen them through so much grief, the connection, the understanding. They want to go back to what they were before, not this hideous limbo.)

There is a celebration later, back at the Collins cottage, and their paths cross by the luncheon table.

“Would it have made a difference if I had changed?” she asks, her eyes on the crowd.

“I never wanted you to change, Phryne.”

“Neither did I,” she says sadly, and he’s not certain if she means that she changed or he did, so he takes a sandwich from the platter and walks away.

She watches him go, and wonders how it is possible to miss what they never truly had.

———

There’s another murder, a bank robbery when she is present, a birthday party for Mac where both are invited, and then another murder. At the end of that they find themselves in her parlour, staring at their whiskeys and waiting for the other to speak first.

“I’ve missed you.”

It doesn’t matter who says it, in the end; the words are out, unretractable. 

(Neither of them wants to retract it.)

More silence.

“Why didn’t it work?” she finally asks, and he sighs.

“I couldn’t be the man you wanted.”

“The man I wanted was _you_ , Jack. And you left me well before a jazz club.”

He doesn’t argue the point.

“The problem with love,” he says, “is that the person who knows you best can hurt you the worst, just by being wrong.”

It’s not why she avoided romantic entanglements, but it was a damned good point. 

“Would you ever try again?”

“With you or in general?” he counters wryly.

She’s not sure which she intended, but she knows which one she wants. She joins him at the mantelpiece, places her whiskey on the side, reaches out to map the angles of his face, his ears, then pulls him towards her lips; his hands span her hips and he pulls her body flush against his.

“I miss you,” she whispers. 

Better the small pain of missing than mutual destruction. His thumb strokes the small of her back, then he picks up his hat and coat and walks away. He pauses at the bottom of the path; frozen in her parlour and uncertain how else it could have played out, she never knows.

———

Murdoch Foyle is set to hang; he doesn’t know if she plans to attend, or if she’d want to see him if she does. But there is a feeling of obligation, that he let her down once before by not ensuring the man was truly dead, and so he speaks with the governor of the gaol (“You are well-connected,” she had teased him once, before she had needed him to remind her who she was, that shadows had never defeated Phryne Fisher) and plans to remain behind the scenes. So, of course, their paths cross as they approach the building.

“Jack,” she exhales, unable to say more. 

“No Doctor MacMillan?” he asks.

“She’s volunteered as coroner.”

He feels foolish; she has never really needed him, but still he has come. 

“Sit with me?” she asks, and so they find themselves seated in two rickety chairs as Foyle is brought out in chains and preparations begin.

Her chin is tilted high and her gaze never wavers; not as Foyle looks at her in betrayal, as they watch the life leave his eyes, not even as the body is carried away. She knows Jack is beside her, hands clasped on the brim of his hat, and does not say a word.

“I thought it would help,” she says quietly, “to know that he is really gone.”

“Give it time, Miss Fisher.”

She wonders whether there is enough time in the world to bridge the gap they have built, or if like the canyons of his cowboy novels it will just erode more.

“Be with me tonight?” she asks; the rope has been thrown, and she waits to see if it reaches the other side.

“Just tonight?” he asks, not knowing what answer he waits for.

Perhaps it does not matter what she says, because her trembling hand is around his bicep and ‘no’ is not an option. He drives her home, walks her up the path, waits for the tentative press of her lips against his before crossing the threshold. It is scraps, to have her (to have him) like this, but they sip at each other’s lips, allow hands to roam, to shed clothes as they waltz—one, two, three, one, two, three—up the stairs and into her boudoir. 

_My Jack_ , she whispers against his skin as he drifts off to sleep. _My Jack, my Jack, my Jack._

He wishes he was, but she wakes to an empty bed.

———

One week slips into two. She does not wade in melancholy—she’s not the sort of person who can, regardless of the state of her heart—but there is a definite feeling that the universe has shifted slightly off-kilter. Like much of her life, she is determined to wrestle the feeling into submission. 

He comes into his office one morning and finds her sitting in his chair, feet on his desk and her arms crossed defensively.

“Miss Fisher,” he nods.

“It’s your day off, Jack. Keep the hat and coat.”

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that Collins was the source of this information. 

There are cases to work on (because there are always cases to work on) and paperwork to finish (because there is always paperwork to finish) and a garden at home that could do with weeding if he was to take the day for himself. He follows her anyway, into the Hispano and is almost—but not quite—immune to the terrifying speeds she drives at.

(He feels himself smiling despite everything, the wind and the sun and the sheer pleasure of being in her company is irresistible.)

She takes him out of Melbourne for a picnic, all of his favourites.

“If I didn’t know better,” he says dryly, “I would think you were trying to get at my case files.”

“Just your trousers, Jack,” she quips back, and he doesn’t even blush.

(She loves to make him blush, but there are better ways to do that than embarrassment.)

“Are we ever going to talk about this?” she asks; half of her expects him to shy away, but she’s tired of waiting. Better to push it now and know than wait in limbo.

“We never did before,” he scoffs without bitterness.

“We should have,” says Phryne. “We could.”

“I’ll never be the man you need.”

There is a distinction between needs and wants, but really Jack is both and she’s fairly certain he won’t believe he’s either. She’s unwilling to let it lie this time.

“I’d like to know what that means, Jack.”

“It means that… I cannot fly, not at your speeds and altitudes.”

“I never asked you to.”

“No,” he admits. “But you would alter your flights to compensate, and what use are wings that have been clipped?”

No bird can live in the sky alone, without nourishment from the land and water below. She packs the picnic basket once more, and drives them to their next stop.

“Luna Park?” he asks.

“I miss this,” she said, meaning what they had been, however briefly.

She takes him on the Great Scenic Railway, again and again and again until they are both dizzy, then looks at him when he finally refuses to join her.

“To chase the thrill single-mindedly,” she says, “is to lose one’s self.”

It sounds pompous and presumptuous and not at all her (and frankly rather obnoxious), but he tilts his head and smirks so slightly she’s not entirely sure it’s not her imagination.

“And one’s lunch, if they aren’t careful. But point taken, Miss Fisher.”

And that is enough for the world to continue spinning, for the universe to keep expanding. The next time he is called to a crime scene, she’s arriving from the opposite direction and meets him on the steps.

“Fancy seeing you here,” she says, though it’s not a surprise to either of them.

Even if they aren’t a telescope.

———

More nightcaps, and dinners, and lunches at the station, and sometimes hints of more in his eyes, in the way she calls his name, in all the little moments. It’s been nearly a year since their return to Melbourne, and who they were in Paris seems further away every day. 

He has forgotten the exact curvature of her body, she has forgotten what he sounds like when he comes; they both tell themselves it is for the best.

(And perhaps it is, but not in the way they think.)

When he kisses her, it’s a toss-up which one of them is more surprised. There’s no big revelation, no secret or tragedy revealed, just her and him and the tenderness of a longed-for kiss.

Aunt Prudence telephones, some minor emergency about a charity gala the following night, and Phryne wants to scream down the telephone line that they are finally home and together and everything is what it could have been; then Jack comes up behind her, arms wrapping around her waist, and kisses her neck, and she forgets to be mad. 

(She also forgets what Aunt P was going on about to begin with, but that is neither here nor there.).

When she hangs up the phone, she turns to him and studies his eyes, looking for answers to questions she can’t voice. He looks back at her, unwavering, and it is enough.

They had agreed to go back, to pretend that it never happened, that it was never more than flirting and innuendo and a bit of fun. (Time doesn’t work like that.) They intended to remain investigative partners, that nothing had changed between them. (Life doesn’t work like that.) Maybe it had been a bad idea, but at least it was something to stifle the loss that is better than what they had found in Europe. (People don’t work like that.)

She pulls him towards the stairs, soft and certain.

(Funny, sometimes, the way it finally works.)


End file.
